by D J Enright
I notice a large, fading notice on the wall of the local church, which stands at a busy crossroads:
BEFORE MAKE
ENTERING SURE OF
BOX YOUR EXIT
Very civic-minded of the church to dispense traffic advice. But there’s no box junction in sight. Then, when I’m halfway across the busy road, I make out a dim shape in the centre of the notice: a crude representation of a coffin. Ah, a religious message, that’s more like it! A motorist toots at me: ‘Want to get yourself killed?’
The story about firing squads has it that one of the rifles contained a blank cartridge, so that every member of the squad could tell himself, it wasn’t me who killed the poor sod. (Compare the less happy hangman and headsman.)
In the world of medicine, ‘healthcare’, the patient passes from one specialist to another, one surgeon to another, one nurse to another. Some of them must be firing blanks. So who is really responsible for you? God is. Groan.
‘I should not really object to dying if it were not followed by death’: Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions. Others might not really object to death if it were not preceded by dying.
Am taken with a story told by Jane Austen’s nephew. She didn’t wish her ‘occupation’ to be known or suspected by servants or visitors, and therefore wrote on small sheets of paper which could readily be hidden under a piece of blotting-paper. ‘There was, between the front door and the offices, a swing-door which creaked when it was opened, but she objected to having this little inconvenience remedied, because it gave her notice when anyone was coming.’ That’s about as far as biographies of writers need go. I came across it in Claire Tomalin’s biography of Jane Austen.
At the age of forty-one, Jane Austen acknowledged that ‘Sickness is a dangerous indulgence at my time of life.’ She died a few months later. On occasion illness, if not of the terminal kind, has been reckoned a blessing in disguise. Commenting on the infidelities of authors, Margaret Oliphant observed that Thomas Carlyle appeared to have ‘trodden the straight way’. To which Jane Carlyle replied: ‘My dear, if Mr Carlyle’s digestion had been better there is no telling what he might not have done!’
Things have come to a sorry pass when one puzzles over the language of junk mail. An Indian take-away in Wimbledon, ‘climbing new heights’, offers ‘the same authenticity of the much relished “Indian cuisine” of the Moghul days’, and informs us that it ‘has been gloved in a high-tech interior and geared towards the future’. What if you want it now?
Increasingly, mail – not only junk – comes addressed to a Mr or Mrs Enri. Computers dock your name to suit their miserable hightech convenience. Soon we shall all be reduced to numbers – the digital revolution.
A support group has been formed in America to help ‘innocent good women who have been heckled, ridiculed, shamed and maimed because they have the name Monica’, and to celebrate the reputations that many earlier Monicas have enjoyed. The name – no jokes about monikers, please – is said by some to derive from Latin monēre, to warn, counsel, admonish. For me it means – and will always mean, no matter how many Lewinskys hit the headlines – the mother of St Augustine. Her son confessed that she suffered greater pangs during his spiritual pregnancy than when giving birth to him in the flesh.
‘ROMEO SEEKS JULIET. Slim man, aged 37, university-educated, with boyish looks, seeks the company of sincere lady, 25–50, for loving relationship.’ ‘MR DARCY SEEKS ELIZABETH. Jut-jawed, jodphurs [sic]-wearing, tall male, 40, seeks warm, winsome, witty, worshipable female, for reciprocally rapturous romance. Lake-loving lass only, please’: Personals, Independent on Sunday. How good to see that literature remains a living force.
Reality, having travestied itself, has made hay of satire. A document comes my way which defies classification. Headed ‘GOD’S TOTAL QUALITY MANAGEMENT QUESTIONNAIRE’, the document states that ‘God would like to thank you for your belief and patronage’ and ‘in order to better serve your needs, God asks that you take a few minutes to answer the following questions’. Responses will be kept confidential, and you need not disclose your name or address, unless of course you wish for direct feedback.
‘How did you find out about your deity?: Newspaper, Bible, Torah, Television, Divine Inspiration, Dead Sea Scrolls, My Mamma Done Tol’ Me, Near Death Experience, Near Life Experience, Burning Shrubbery, Other Ways (please specify).’
‘Did your God come to you undamaged, with all parts in good working order and with no obvious breakage or missing attributes? If no, please describe the problems you initially encountered: Not eternal, Finite in space, Does not occupy or inhabit the entire cosmos, Not omniscient, Not omnipotent, Permits sex outside of marriage, Prohibits sex outside of marriage, Makes or permits bad things to happen to good people, When beseeched, does not stay beseeched, Requires burnt offerings, Requires virgin sacrifices, etc.’
‘What factors were relevant in your decision to acquire a deity?: Indoctrinated by parents, Needed a reason to live, Needed focus whom to despise, Hate to think for myself, Fear of death, Wanted to piss off parents, Needed a day away from work, My shrubbery caught fire and a loud voice commanded me to do it, etc.’
‘Are you currently using any other source of inspiration in addition to God: Tarot, Lottery, Astrology, Television, Fortune cookies, Playboy and/or Playgirl, Sex, Drugs, Rock and roll, Alcohol, Tea leaves, The Internet, Burning shrubbery, Teletubbies, etc.?’
‘God employs a limited degree of Divine Intervention to preserve the balanced level of felt presence and blind Faith. Which would you prefer?: More Divine Intervention, Less Divine Intervention, Current degree of Divine Intervention is just about right.’
‘Do you have any additional comments or suggestions for improving the quality of God’s services? Attach an additional sheet if necessary.’
‘As an incentive (the flesh is agreed to be weak), it is promised that if you return the completed questionnaire by a certain date you will be entered in a draw for the One Free Miracle of Your Choice.’
The document concludes: ‘Thank you, (signed) Daryl, Clerk of the Supreme Being of the Apocalypse.’
The demotic language may give us to pause, yet there is no sound reason to suppose that God is a snob. Many of the issues broached are of crucial importance to us all in both theory and practice. Some of the marginal allusions I have omitted, for instance, pop stars, talk-show presenters, sporting personages, models and role models, cooks and comics, and other celebrities unknown to me. More often than not, God is considered omniscient (if at times pretending not to be), and is clearly no shrinking violet, but one might expect there to be certain topics, trivial, vulgar or otherwise inappropriate, which neither he nor his agents, nor even self-appointed evangelists, would dream of pondering in public. But then, can we be sure? He moves in a mysterious way.
Here’s something of a wonder performed. ‘If the clerk to the journals of the House of Lords should die, I had some hopes that my kinsman, who had the place at his disposal, would appoint me to succeed him.’ When William Cowper mentioned this to a friend, they ‘both expressed an earnest wish for his death, that I might be provided for’. The occupant of the coveted position promptly died. And the consequent sense of God’s wrath, along with some doubt as to God’s existence, unfitted Cowper, then in his early thirties, for any place at all. He repeatedly made to end his life by drinking a phial of laudanum, but some invisible hand forced the bottle away. He took his penknife into bed, placed it beneath his left breast, and leant his full weight on it: the point broke off. He tried to hang himself with his garter, but it slipped off the bedpost. He climbed on a chair and looped the garter over a half-opened door: the garter snapped. He had done his best, and failed. God had cast him out. When Jesus cursed the barren fig tree, it was Cowper he had in mind. (This might throw light on a perplexing parable.) If Cowper went into the street, ‘I thought the people stood and laughed at me, and held me in contempt.’ He bought a ballad from one who was singing it in the street, ‘because I though
t it was written on me’.
Thus poor Cowper and his ‘quivering sensibility’: a ‘stricken deer’, a timorous, melancholic, ineffectual wreck, not merely damned but ‘damned below Judas’. And yet, what a powerful ego: he couldn’t hear a street ballad without supposing himself the subject of it. What a towering awareness of self: me, ‘Me miserable! how could I escape/ Infinite wrath and infinite despair!’ Admittedly the castaway, swept overboard, did drown; but Cowper perished ‘beneath a rougher sea/ And whelm’d in deeper gulfs than he’.
It’s not so surprising that someone of such intensities, with such a command of metaphor, should be capable, in a calmer state of mind, of near-Popeian satire, and of some notably humane poems, cogent and idiosyncratic. ‘The Negro’s Complaint’: ‘Prove that you have human feelings,/ Ere you proudly question ours!’ And on that old and ever new argument, that if, say, we don’t sell arms, someone else will:
If foreigners likewise would give up the trade,
Much more on behalf of your wish might be said;
But while they get riches by purchasing blacks,
Pray tell me why we may not also go smacks?
And on hunting: ‘Detested sport,/ That owes its pleasures to another’s pain.’
Cowper was quite a tough customer, after all. ‘I was a grovelling creature once’, but behind a frowning providence, God hides a smiling face. He knew what he was about. ‘God is his own interpreter,/ And he will make it plain.’ Interpretation can take time, of course.
Michael Hamburger translates Ernst Jandl’s ‘nichts und etwas’ (‘nothing and something’):
nothing in my head
I sit down
at the typewriter
insert a sheet
with nothing on it
with something on it
I extract the sheet
from the typewriter
and read as a text
something out of my head.
Small to the point of minimal, yet the poem ‘celebrates a miracle and mystery of sorts’, Hamburger comments. ‘Something has really come out of nothing.’ Yes, the miracle and mystery some of us have relied on. But when there’s nothing available in the head, when the head is stuffed with incipiences, banal foibles, petty grievances and caprices? Gone, it seems, are the days when poetry warned and exhorted, desolated and consoled. Nowadays its ambition is to amuse or intrigue fleetingly: a very minor branch of the entertainment industry, less imagination than fancy, less fancy than whimsy. Czeslaw Milosz has asked why we feel shame when looking through a book of poems, as if the author, for some unknown reason, is addressing the worse side of our nature. ‘Seasoned with jokes, clowning, satire,/Poetry still knows how to please./ … But the grave combats where life is at stake/ Are fought in prose.’ Not that I have anything against entertainment that entertains rather than panders to its audience. And there’s decent sense in Kit Wright’s foray against pomposity and empty earnestness: ‘… unacknowledged legislators!/ How’s that for insane afflatus?’
‘The greatness of poets lies in grasping with their words what they only glimpse with their minds’: Paul Valéry. Is the greatness of prose writers really any different?
‘Here is a marvel: we now have many more poets than judges and connoisseurs of poetry. Poetry is easier to write than to appreciate’: Montaigne. Some things don’t change: a chastening thought, but also – one comes to see – a cheering thought.
Since much of the poetry written today might just as well – or rather better – be written as prose, I have decided (with some help from outside) to confine myself to writing prose. Even so, reading is another matter.
Laugh at yourself in private by all means (means won’t be hard to come by), but go easy in public. Anyone seen laughing at himself is truly laughable. Coleridge tells two apposite stories. A certain Nehemiah Higginbottom published a satirical sonnet about the house that Jack built, demonstrating the indiscriminate use of ornate, overblown language and imagery (‘And this reft house is that, the which he built’), and incorporating phrases stolen from Coleridge’s poems. This was believed to have wounded Coleridge sorely. It happened that he was himself the author of it. And then he was seen as the unhappy victim of a cruel epigram directed against ‘The Ancient Mariner’, already an object of derision:
Your poem must eternal be,
Dear sir! it cannot fail.
For ’tis incomprehensible,
And without head or tail!
something he had composed and printed in The Morning Post.
Asking for trouble … And yet there may be occasions, rather rare, when a person can feel decently (or superstitiously) obliged to do in public what he more commonly does in private.
In his prose Coleridge wanders off at all angles and in a number of tongues, and the drift of his announced theme is hard to keep in view. The asides are often the best, most comprehensible things there. In his obscure meditations on the distinction between fancy and imagination, he remarks that ‘in all societies there exists an instinct of growth, a certain collective, unconscious good sense working progressively to desynonymize those words originally of the same meaning’. A large, learned book condensed in a short limpid sentence! Elsewhere, in the course of a lengthy and elaborate diatribe against a now forgotten blood-and-thunder, Charles Robert Maturin’s play, Bertram, or The Castle of St Aldobran, and within an aside on the English origin of the German drama (flattering neither nation), there comes a further aside characterizing James Hervey’s equally forgotten Meditations among the Tombs, which is ‘poetic only on account of its utter unfitness for prose, and might as appropriately be called prosaic from its utter unfitness for poetry’.
‘He would have done better if he had known less’ (Hazlitt). Or remembered less or been less enthusiastically digressive, less ready to invoke his sprawling knowledge at every opportunity whether pertinent or not, and if he had moderated his meanderings, what a terrific critic he would have been! In fact he often is. And perhaps without those monstrous contexts there would be no precious asides.
A splendid instance of accuracy, succinctness, force and general application arises in Coleridge’s Notebooks, apropos of the demands Milton makes on the reader. The latter is ‘surrounded with sense; it rises in every line’, ‘there are no lazy intervals’: ‘If this be called obscurity, let it be remembered that it is such an obscurity as is a compliment to the reader; not that vicious obscurity, which proceeds from a muddled head.’
Goethe’s saying both fascinates and discomposes: ‘If in old age intelligent and thoughtful persons set little store by knowledge, it is only because they have asked too much of it and of themselves.’ In what way have they asked too much? Did they expect that knowledge would fend off age? Or preserve their health? Or keep their memory – without which knowledge deserts us – in good repair? Not if they were intelligent and thoughtful. Have they worn themselves out in the acquiring of knowledge (and we have it on good authority that those who increase knowledge increase sorrow)? Are they, when they cease to prize knowledge, still intelligent and thoughtful, or is that asking too much of them? Or has some different, darker knowledge taken them over? A sense of the absurd, say. ‘We are tiny specks in the infinite vastness of the universe; our lives are mere instants, … we will all be dead any minute,’ as Thomas Nagel puts it. And ‘In ordinary life a situation is absurd when it includes a conspicuous discrepancy between pretension or aspiration and reality.’ (But note Pascal: the eternal silence of those infinite spaces terrified him, yet ‘Through space the universe encloses me and swallows me up like a speck; through thought I enclose it.’)
Nagel concludes with words that some may find faintly comforting: ‘If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that does not matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism or despair.’ Irony can stand a lot of weight, but not that much. The modern concept of the absurd, while it carries some respectable character references, is
distinctly unGoethean. Four years after his reflection on old age’s disappointment with knowledge, when he was seventy-six, Goethe proposed that growing older meant entering on a new business in changed circumstances, ‘and one must either give up activity altogether or assume the new role with awareness and intention’. This leaves questions unanswered, but that’s in the nature of wise sayings, and of life with its propensity to raise new questions.
Mixed blessings. The statement that falling out of bed kills more people than the human form of BSE is meant to reassure, but at the expense of our night-life. There are questions best left unanswered, or unasked. ‘Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days.’ A gentleman of seventy-two years reports that when he went for his annual flu jab, he was offered one for pneumonia as well. This being new to him, he asked when he would need another jab. The nurse told him, ‘Oh, you won’t. They last about ten years.’
*
Then lo! the sainted MONITOR is born,
Whose pious face some sacred texts adorn,
As artful sinners cloak the secret sin,
To veil with seeming grace the guile within:
So moral Essays on his front appear,
But all is carnal business in the rear.
‘Carnal business in the rear’ may bring Proust’s M. de Charlus to mind, but these lines on the Sunday newspapers were written in 1785 by George Crabbe. In his different idiom and availing himself of satirist’s licence, Karl Kraus touched on the theme in 1911, submitting that the contraceptive ads were the only decent, sensible and tasteful contributions appearing in the Viennese papers, until the press spoilt it all by repudiating on the highly moral front pages what it promoted against payment on the back pages.